During these few days we headed away from Lincoln, MT and into the Bob Marshall Wilderness with heavy packs full of food for seven days. We skipped a resupply stop in Augusta in order to catch up with Dirty Money!
Day 125 – Mile 2724.3 – Llamas
This morning we had a lot of climbing as we walked along high ridges with amazing views. It was a bit chilly and windy. We saw a couple out with their 5 llamas. They were training the llamas and elk hunting. We ate our lunch with Butters and Beer Goddess. We also saw Lone Wolf. It is nice to have other hikers around to socialize with! In the afternoon we descended from 8000 ft to 5000 ft down into a river valley. We spend a lot of time up high walking the divide, so it was a nice change to be in the valley looking up at the mountains above us. We got to camp around dark. -R
Day 126 – Mile 2751.3 – Dirty Money!!
The excitement of today was that we planned to meet our friend Dirty Money! She has been a little bit ahead of us since the middle of Colorado but we all decided to meet up for our final push to the Canadian border. The hiking was unusually easy today — we were hiking through a valley with very little up and down. A lot of the forest had previously burned but we went through occasional patches of green living trees. At about 4:30 we made it to the trailhead where we were supposed to meet Dirty Money, but she wasn’t there! It turned out we were just a bit early and she got there a few minutes after us. The reunion was very nice! We hiked on together and chatted for the final 8 miles of the day as we hiked to camp. As we got close to camp we passed some other campers who said they had just seen a grizzly bear ahead of us on the trail. We didn’t let that scare us from camping in the area, but unfortunately we didn’t see the bear. We enjoyed cooking and chatting together and even enjoyed some whiskey that Dirty Money packed out — woohoo! -T
Day 127 – Mile 2778.4 – The Chinese Wall
Today we had beautiful scenery, nice weather, and great company. We are currently in Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness. Today we walked next to the Chinese Wall for quite awhile, which is a rock formation extending for many miles that looks like a huge wall. We had lunch with a nice view of the wall and saw mountain goats climbing around on the wall. This evening we got to camp a bit earlier than usual (7:45 pm). We are camped next to water in a spot that has clearly been used by other backpackers before. We normally avoid both of those in grizzly bear country. The forest floor was quite bushy though, so it was challenging to find a different spot. We enjoyed dinner and chatted with Dirty Money before heading to bed. -R
